SOURCE: Ward, Ian. “Law and Justice in the Modern Novel: The Concept of Responsibility.” In Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives, pp. 142-56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Ward explores Kafka's The Trial and Camus's The Outsider as texts useful in the literary and legal study of the concept of responsibility.

There is no doubt that modern literature has been more extensively used by law and literature scholars than any other literary source. It does not, then, represent a particularly new perspective. There are, of course, certain contemporary ‘modern’ texts which are fresh, and I will look at a couple of these in the final two chapters of this book. However, in this chapter I want briefly to provide an example of how modern literature can be used as a means of accessing certain key concepts in contemporary critical theory and critical legal scholarship. The...